their natural
constitution is concerned; and if we criticize the results of bad
education, that is mainly criticism of the blindness, the stupidity, and
the carelessness of men, who are responsible for the parodies of
education and the misdirection of ideals which have so grossly
afflicted, and still afflict, childhood and girlhood in all civilized
communities.

Yet, again, there is another misconception of the maternal instinct as
it exists in our own species, which is still more serious in its
results. The argument is that, not only does the maternal instinct
exist, but it is a sure guide to its possessor, who therefore requires
no instruction--least of all at the hands of men. A woman being a woman
knows all about babies, a man being a man knows nothing. Against this
error the present writer has endeavoured to inveigh for many years past,
and it is always retorted that insistence upon the ignorance of mothers
is a very unwarrantable piece of discourtesy. It is nothing of the sort.
Native ignorance is the mark of intelligence. It is just because
instinct in us has not the perfection of detail which it has in, say,
the insects, that it is capable of that limitless modification which
shows itself in educated intelligence, and all that educated
intelligence has achieved and will yet achieve. It may be permitted to
quote from a former statement of this point:--[12]

"The mother has only the maternal instinct in its essence. That could
not be permitted to lapse by natural selection, since humanity could
never have been evolved at all if women did not love babies. But of all
details she is bereft. She has instead an immeasurably greater thing,
intelligence, but whilst intelligence can learn everything it has
everything to learn. Subhuman instinct can learn nothing, but is perfect
from the first within its impassable limits. It is this lapse of
instinctive aptitude that constitutes the cardinal difficulty against
which we are assembled. The mother cat not merely has a far less
helpless young creature to succour, but she has a far superior inherent
or instinctive equipment; she knows the best food for her kitten, she
does not give it 'the same as we had ourselves'--as the human mother
tells the coroner--but her own breast invariably. None of us can teach
her anything as to washing her kitten, or keeping it warm. She can even
play with it and so educate it, in so far as it needs education. There
are mothers in all classes o